Is gambling the reason we have pro sports?

0:01NPR.

0:06This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. The FIFA Men's World Cup is expected to be the biggest sports betting event ever. And around the world, sports gambling has a long history that goes back millennia, all the way back to ancient Olympic Games in Greece. Spectators at horse races in England and France have been betting since the 17th century. And it's been legal in many countries for decades. In the U.S., though, sports gambling was essentially illegal until 2018. Other than Nevada and a handful of other places. Right. Always Nevada. Then, in 2018, a Supreme Court decision allowed states to legalize this kind of betting.

0:48But David Vecchino has his own take about how long gambling has been a part of American sports. He's the author of the new book, Over Under, an unexpected history of sports betting. If you look back, betting and wagering and the people who placed bets were basically at the beginning of nearly every single American sport, league and competition that we have. They were the first ones to show up. David argues that gambling is not something that grew out of American sports. It's actually the other way around. Collegiate and professional sports in the U.S. exist in their current form because of gambling.

1:25Today on the show, David makes his case that the American love of wagering fueled the rise of professional sports. And he tells us how he views the current boom in gambling.

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2:21When my arm is down and hits my shoulder, that's not. It's those nuances that proved incredibly difficult for machines to be able to handle for a very, very long time. That is, until IBM entered the octagon. Listen to Smart Talks with IBM wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from Capella University. You know that feeling when there's a spark building inside you?

3:01That you were meant for more? That's your own drive pushing you towards what's next. Capella University gets that. With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting life on pause. You've built experience and know what you're capable of. Now, this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. David Bacchino is an Associate Professor of sport management at Elon University in North Carolina. The students in his program learned the business side of sports from law to sales and marketing.

3:40Do you like survey your students about how many of them, you know, participate in sports gambling or have like DraftKings accounts? And is it like 90 percent, 100 percent like all the time management students? I survey them all the time. It's a super high percentage. But the two most interesting pieces of information I get from my students. I asked them, do you know somebody who you think has a sports betting problem? And nearly all of them do raise their hands. But then I asked them, and these are kids who want to work in sport management in some capacity. I asked them if sport betting is a net negative or a net positive for American sports.

4:18And I leave it vague on purpose. And the vast majority think it's a net negative, even though they participate in it. David's book charts how this uneasiness with gambling in the U.S. was there from the early days in sports like baseball, football, and college basketball. So how did wagering on an outcome of a game even start? Well, David's book describes how sports didn't used to be a professional or semi-professional activity. You know, early on in your book, you point out something that I had never thought about before, which is this idea that if we take baseball, it used to be a recreational activity that people did for fun.

4:58And it wasn't necessarily inevitable that Americans would pay money to watch other people play baseball. I mean, that for me was like something I really had to sit and think about. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And, you know, what's going to create that spark that says, let's all get together and go watch people play baseball. You know, what I found in those early years is that what got those people to go out and watch baseball games was gambling, was betting. is that me and you show up to a game and I say, hey, you take the red team, I'll take the blue team, we'll bet a nickel, we'll bet a dime, we'll bet a dollar or whatever.

5:31And it just gives us a reason to root for one team or the other. What were the early bets on baseball like? Like we don't have that much information on what they were specifically betting on because these were just literally random people sitting on bleachers, right? In Manhattan. But there is evidence that people were doing what DraftKings and FanDuel call in-game betting now, right? pitch by pitch. And so a batter comes up and say, I bet he gets a hit. I bet he doesn't. And we bet on that. And so this wasn't just who's going to win the game. People have been doing this sort of in-game betting for years.

6:04And in fact, the official historian of Major League Baseball has said that gambling is one of three essential ingredients for a game to grow into a national professional sport. That's because betting helps people care about the outcome of a game. I don't think they care for other reasons, too. Nah. Just the hard, cold cash. Want that nickel. David says the spectators that placed bets at games proved to be valuable customers. They bought more tickets and they stayed for longer. The other two essential ingredients are statistics and publicity. And David says this combination of gambling, stats, and public awareness shows up in other professional sports like boxing and American football.

6:46But the people running these leagues haven't always felt comfortable with the connection to betting. Some of this is tied to cultural ebbs and flows and sentiment around gambling. But David sees a business reason behind the unease. They thought that gambling would lead to fixed games. And fixed games would lead to a damage to the integrity of the game. I've come to believe that the word integrity was really just a stand-in for value. And so what they're saying is that, hey, more gambling will lead to fixed games. Fixed games will then lead to potential decreased fan interest, which will then bring down the value of our franchises, the value of our leagues.

7:31People won't show up anymore. It's not an unreasonable anxiety, right? Because you document some of the most famous kind of fixes and scandals in sports and they were incredibly damaging, right? Like it's not good to fix the sports game. No, it's not. And there is immediate fallout, especially for the players involved. I think we've gotten to the point, though, where I'm not sure major game fixing scandals would have that much of an effect on the popularity of amateur and professional sports. And I might be taking a contrarian opinion here. We've had multiple game fixing scandals and suspensions and arrests since 2018.

8:11Sports have literally never been more popular. And sports gambling in the U.S. is more popular than ever. Leagues, teams, media networks, and even individual athletes have official partnerships with gambling companies like sportsbook operators. Data from the American Gaming Association show that sports betting revenues totaled$17 billion in 2025. That's up 23 % from the prior year. All of this activity has been accompanied by not just game-fixing scandals, but other problems like addiction and the harassment of players. The NCAA recently surveyed athletes and found that around 35 % of Division I men's basketball players reported experiencing social media abuse related to sports betting.

8:55Meanwhile, prediction markets like Calci offer another way to bet on games. With a typical sports book, customers place bets against a bookmaker, the house essentially. A prediction market is peer-to-peer. There is no house. Despite the different mechanics, the end result is still people wagering on games. That's why some lawmakers have criticized prediction market companies for skirting regulations around sports betting. Regardless of the platform, David says gambling has become super accessible to fans. They can place bets through a mobile app. I've heard some pundits, you know, call gambling an invasive species.

9:32I think the complete opposite is true. I think gambling is native to American sports. The last 20 years when people have been gambling more, it's an accessibility shift. If you had given people in the 1930s phones and the laws and the Internet, they would have been betting on college football just the same way we are. Did reporting this book, you know, reshape your thinking in any way around these things? It has changed my thinking in some ways. The biggest one is that I don't love that betting is this big a part of American sports, even if it was inevitable. David says he doesn't like how modern betting has stripped away the communal aspects of sports fandom.

10:12And his students agree. They do see the pitfalls that are put before us here, the potential drawbacks to fans who are more interested in their individual bets than they are for the success of the team. And I think that's a good thing because I don't think we're getting rid of legal sports betting anytime soon. David says he's optimistic that the new generation will come up with ways to limit the negative effects of sports gambling. Want to bet? I'll bet you a nickel. The stakes are so low, you might get one. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

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